“Don’t settle for fine! Tomorrow starts today!” Keynote speaker Mike Jaffe pumped up the 900-plus attendees at the ASHA 2014 Schools Conference in July with a message of bucking the rut and trying new approaches.

If changing your work approach seems intimidating, start small, advised the 9/11 survivor and businessman-turned motivational speaker. “You just need the confidence to take that first step,” Jaffe said.

Echoing that sentiment, speakers at the three-day Pittsburgh meeting sent a clear message that traditional top-down, clinician-dictating treatment is a thing of the past. The predominant theme? Children want to feel like they’re driving their own treatment and learning. Otherwise there’s little hope that they’ll respond to interventions.

“Don’t talk down to the kid. Be open and honest,” advised Joseph Donaher of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in a session on children who stutter. “How can you tell if you’re reaching them? By how engaged they are.”

Similarly, students with traumatic brain injury need to feel they are crafting their own metacognitive strategies regarding, for example, impulse control and memory—with your help, said Angela Hein Ciccia of Case Western Reserve University. “Our role is to help them think about their own thoughts,” she said in a session on TBI treatment.

And when it comes to children on the autism spectrum, it’s key to show children what needs to be done, rather than telling them, noted Sarah Ward of Massachusetts General Hospital in a session on social thinking and executive function that she co-presented with Michelle Garcia Winner.

“These kids need to imagine themselves in a future situation doing that thing before they can do it,” Ward explained. Rather than telling them to get out an assignment, she recommended helping them visualize where that sheet of paper might be and what steps they could take to locate it.

Other sessions at the conference tackled such practical and pressing topics as English-language learner eligibility, iPad apps for speech, response-to-intervention strategies, alignment with the Common Core, special education law, and augmentative and alternative communication. For a sampling of what topped attendees’ lists of pressing issues, check out the ASHAsphere blog post from the conference. And for a lighthearted social media chronology of the event, check out on.asha.org/schools-story.